


Mary's Yellow Face

by SweetLateJuliet



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 08:48:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1260247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetLateJuliet/pseuds/SweetLateJuliet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Speculation about Mary's first family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mary's Yellow Face

As I work my way back through ACD canon, some stories are familiar based on what we’ve already seen onscreen in  _Sherlock_ , some don’t spark any special feeling, some are downright odd… and some give me a shock of recognition:  _Oh! I see where they’re going with this._ Like whichwolfwins observed in [this post](http://whichwolfwins.tumblr.com/post/74374538453/mary-morstan-and-the-yellow-face), “The Yellow Face” was one of these shock-of-recognition stories for me. (story [summary](http://bakerstreet.wikia.com/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Yellow_Face) | [text](http://bakerstreet.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Text:_The_Adventure_of_the_Yellow_Face))

BBC Mary’s past is a known unknown - we know she’s got secrets, but we know only the barest sketch of what they are. CAM’s wedding telegram (“Wish your family could have seen this”) and Mary’s troubled reaction to it suggest that one of her secrets relates to her family. I suspect that this secret is more than “I left my parents behind when I became a spy,” and this potential connection with “The Yellow Face” - a secret husband and child - is one plausible explanation. (I’m trying to sound neutral and unattached, but I totally think this is going to happen.:)

Further, I’m pretty convinced that Mary’s current baby isn’t John’s (post [here](http://sweetlatejuliet.tumblr.com/post/78152648053/thats-not-johns-baby-mr-holmes-why-the-plant)), and for me this previous family fits with that, and my understanding (hope) that Mary is a flawed but ultimately sympathetic character.

Imagine that Mary (A.G.R.A. back then) married and had a child, but that her spy life put this family in danger and she had to leave them behind for their own safety. In her new, Mary-Morstan life, she falls in love with John. When John’s about to propose, she steps away to call her first husband with a final goodbye. (“Sorry that took so long,” she says to John as she returns from presumably the loo. “Now then, what did you want to ask me?” She’s an  _intelligence agent_. She knew what question was coming.)

But sentiment (human error) makes her meet with the first husband one last time before she marries John. And things go farther than she intended, and soon Sherlock’s telling her she’s pregnant. John doesn’t reject the idea as impossible, though surely two adult medical professionals, one secretly a spy, would be generally able and likely to prevent a pregnancy they weren’t intending. An unplanned tryst with Hubby #1, however…

(Note: For me, this isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for John. When he cares, he  _cares_. More on that [here](http://sweetlatejuliet.tumblr.com/post/77493801194/im-pretty-sure-john-is-the-father-but-i-have-to-admit).) 

A Yellow Face backstory would also give an extra layer of meaning to the beautiful, saturated yellow of the wedding reception venue, and to this yellow lighting on Mary as she learns she’s pregnant:

**Race Is Important!**

In “The Yellow Face,” Effie Munro, a white woman, was originally married to a black man, and their daughter “is darker far than ever her father was.” That’s why little Lucy has to wear a mask and gloves - so nobody will comment on the dark-skinned child who’s moved into the neighborhood.

This premise would be difficult to transfer to BBC Mary, for both the hypothetical child she already has and the new baby potentially fathered by the first husband rather than John. For the first kid, being multiracial better not be an issue at all; the secret is just the existence of the child, not his/her skin color. For the new baby, I just  _cannot_ see Mary giving birth to a multiracial baby and that being the big reveal. (“But that CAN’T be John’s baby!”) Way, way too problematic.

However, adapting “The Yellow Face” but leaving out the skin-color twist is problematic too. If BBC Mary’s first husband and their child are white,  _Sherlock_ has effectively erased two people of color from the story, and a powerful message of racial acceptance as well. Both Effie Munro and her second husband Grant rose above the racism of their social milieu, Effie by falling in love with and marrying a black man, and Grant by accepting Effie and the child he’s just learned is hers:

> It was a long ten minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I [Watson] love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.
> 
> “We can talk it over more comfortably at home,” said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”

So if Mary’s backstory uses the “Yellow Face” storyline of a secret family but omits the race twist, I hope against hope that we get some other really fantastic, narratively important characters of color in S4 to offset that change. (Including, I will cross my fingers, an awesome Sally Donovan storyline.)


End file.
